On a sunny afternoon in November 2020, in front of Sweet Adeline Bakery in south Berkeley, Susan Moffat came upon a string quartet.
“Their playing was spectacular,” said Moffat, creative director of Future Histories Lab at UC Berkeley.
The musicians were members of the award-winning, San Francisco-based chamber ensemble Del Sol String Quartet. They’d recently launched the Joy Project, for which they’d commissioned a body of short musical works written to give joy during the pandemic and were performing free concerts in public spaces all around the Bay Area.
“It was during the depths of the pandemic,” Moffat said, “and hearing live music was not just a pleasure, but a kind of medicine.”
Moffat learned the performers were also using music to explore darker issues: They had commissioned an oratorio from composer Huang Ruo about San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island, the site of a historic U.S. immigration station, in operation from 1910 to 1940, where Chinese immigrants and others were incarcerated in detention barracks, sometimes for years, in harsh conditions as they waited to be processed.
Del Sol premiered Angel Island — Oratorio for Voices and Strings in the detention barracks on Angel Island in October 2021. The audience of several hundred people sat in chairs in a room where immigrants had once been incarcerated in crowded bunks stacked three beds high.
“It was an incredibly moving piece,” said Moffat. “I thought, ‘We have to bring this to UC Berkeley somehow.’ I never would have guessed that this chance encounter would lead to a campuswide, interdisciplinary arts and public history project on immigration.”
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